Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

The boy could smell the tired miasma of alcohol, perfume and tobacco that drifted around them.

Old Ma Coker is being released.”

The labour of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin. Proverbs 10:16. The boy mouthed the words silently as he read them, but he made no attempt to decipher the meaning. He had been press-ganged into Sunday School attendance every week for ten years and had managed to pay only cursory attention to the subject of sin.

Holloway had an air of romance for the boy. He imagined beautiful, helpless girls trapped inside its thick stone walls, waiting to be saved, primarily by himself.

Racy and sensational were not part of Frobisher’s character. He was sober-minded, although not without depth or humour, neither of which was often called on by the Metropolitan Police.

Nellie Coker’s progeny in the order in which they entered onto the world’s stage. First of all, Niven—unsurprisingly absent from Holloway this morning—followed soon after by Edith. There had followed a hiatus while Nellie attempted to refute further motherhood and then, having failed, she produced in quick succession Betty, Shirley and Ramsay, and bringing up the rear, the runt of the litter, eleven-year-old Kitty,

Nellie had received a French education, something which could be interpreted in several ways.

Sometimes, Nellie was more like a theatrical promoter than a mother.

She understood business and had the Borgia stomach necessary for it.

They had all known what it was like to have some and then to have none and now to have a lot, and none of them wanted to fall off the precipice into penury again.

They were older than the date on their birth certificates suggested, while Ramsay knew that he was younger.

He knew criminals, he knew dukes. (“No difference,” Nellie said.)

There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself.

“Out of sight, out of mind” was one of the useful epithets that had guided her life.

That was just the beginning of the fleecing. You couldn’t even leave without handing over a shilling to the cloakroom girl if you wanted to retrieve your coat at the end of the night. Plus a tip, of course. The Amethyst ran on tips.

The Amethyst did not have pretensions to the haut monde like the Embassy club, nor was it scraping the gutter for custom like some of the flea-ridden dives of Curzon Street.

It added to the “drama” of it all, Nellie said. Everyone wanted drama. At the bottom of the stairs, you were greeted by another doorman, this one liveried with frogging, epaulettes and so on, a costume that would not have looked out of place on a rear admiral in an operetta.

Of course, although most servants will recognize their masters, few masters will remember the faces of their servants.

He still referred to him as a “German shepherd,” not an “Alsatian,” immune—or indifferent—to the enemy connotations of the name.

At no point in the war or after, including the Armistice and the Peace, did Niven ever think anyone had won. He no longer had the patience for people’s foibles. No patience for people at all. No time for religion, no time for scruples, no time for feelings. Niven’s heart appeared adamantine, fired in the crucible of the war.

He’d put an end to the tale of woe by giving the girl enough cash to make her “problem” disappear. There was a woman in Covent Garden whom the girls all seemed to know about. The solution was often worse than the problem, but “you take your chances,” the girl in the storeroom said. Her problem was not of Niven’s making. He was careful to leave no trace of himself in this world.

The kiss disturbed Nellie. It felt more like Gethsemane than filial affection.

she recognized the language of the enemy when she heard it.

Maddox was as sly as a fox and Nellie kept a henhouse, the queen of the coop. Did she also give Maddox free access to her chickens? (Yes, prone to extended metaphors.)

He had been an awkward, reticent child. Now he was an awkward, reticent man, but better at disguising it with a stiff carapace.

Frobisher had no small talk, he never had done. It meant that he was a much misunderstood man, presumed to be standoffish, arrogant even.

His real passions were esoteric, of little interest to the common man or his colleagues in Bow Street, certainly not to his wife—the Berlin Treaty between Germany and the Soviets (how could that end well?) or a demonstration of a “televisor” to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird (like something from an H. G. Wells novel). He had an enquiring mind. It was a curse. Even sometimes for a detective.

For a pretty girl, she was surprisingly lacking in vanity about her looks, which she considered to be more a matter of chance than anything else. Or God-given, if you believed that God gave beauty as a gift, which seemed unlikely. It was more like the kind of trick that the Greek gods played on people—a curse rather than a gift. One of the few books Freda had read was an illustrated anthology of Greek myths (A Child’s Guide) that she had found abandoned on the seat in a train carriage when she was ten years old. It was hardly a helpful primer for life.

Freda had been on display since she was able to sit up unaided and had a battery of photographs that catalogued her progression, from appearing in Bonny Baby competitions to playing the locally sourced Clara in a professional touring Nutcracker the previous Christmas.

Gladys had, in the past, exploited Freda’s looks for an income, but the investment was no longer paying off.

It was her talent rather than her looks that gave Freda cause for pride.

Freda was a dainty child and took instruction well; it made her popular with adults.

If they could have kept a piece of her as a relic—a finger bone, a lock of hair, even a pom-pom—they would have done.

“It’s not real, pet,” she said to Freda when she expressed admiration. “It’s a trick.” But that was even better than real!

Freda made no judgements. She was learning about womanhood. You take it where you can, as Duncan would say.

Freda was not going to work in Rowntree’s! She was going to be a star! She was going to be famous! She was going to go to London! She would rather die of a surfeit of exclamation marks before she worked in an office or a factory!

Nellie watched a freckled thrush tugging a worm out of a bed of red tulips. The worms would have their vengeance, for one day they would eat the thrush. They would eat Nellie, too. She feared it would not be long before she was worm food. She must prepare. She needed a plan.

There was nothing mystifying about the cards. You might have said their message was Ozymandian. The serpent, the scythe, a coffin and a bouquet. The end of the party.

Nellie was tired. For perhaps the first time in her life she was wearying of the relentless drive required to keep their lives thrusting forward.

She knew that her health would not survive incarceration a second time and while in Holloway had begun to wonder about retiring—Deauville possibly, or even Torquay (a residential suite in the Imperial Hotel perhaps)—handing the keys to the kingdom to her children, with the crown going to the ever-reliable Edith.

she and her sister were members of the notorious Forty Thieves gang. All women. (“Good idea,” Nellie said.)

It seemed that Maddox was no longer content to be the knave, he wanted to overthrow the Queen of Clubs and make himself the King.

Lenormand cards

Maud was an account demanding to be settled. There was a reckoning coming for Nellie. Could she outrun it? That was the question. Not even Deauville seemed far enough.

Everything Nellie had done had been done for her children, not so much from love as from biology, the maternal imperative to foster and protect the generations, enabling the Cokers to go on and on until the crack of doom and the Last Judgement,

She must safeguard that legacy for the future, even if sacrifice was necessary, her own or someone else’s. Someone else’s, for preference.

Of course, in Nellie’s (quite wide) experience, a man lurking behind a tree could be up to any number of things, most of them unpleasant.

He was making himself very obvious. Shouldn’t a spy try to fade into the background a bit more? And why was he watching Nellie at this moment in time? He was supposed to be keeping an eye on Hanover Terrace, for heaven’s sake.

She was not mad, nor French, nor particularly beautiful. She was a librarian.

Gwendolen believed that it was always best to sound confident, even if you were not. It helped to prevent those around you from faltering.